The House Game: what it is and why it is awesome.

I'm a character nut. There, I said it, the end.

I tend to get really excited about things in general, and since I'm super addicted to my characters sometimes I just have to talk about them for five hours straight. It is little surprise that I have no friends.

Okay, actually I have one friend. We haven't lived in the same state for several years now, but she never seems to mind me talking to her for hours and hours and hours about how thick X character's eyelashes are. I love her. She's the best.

Anyways, last year I invented this game which I creatively called "the House Game". It requires two people-- one to describe a house in minute detail, the other to guess things about the person or people who live there.

Guidelines:

• Pick a character.
• Describe their house/living space in detail, but not telling anything in particular about the people who live there. (like, not how many people live there or the genders or anything.) 
• Give this description to a friend
• Cruelly force them to describe who they think would live there. Preferably in detail.

Here's a round I played with my very lovely friend (who, by the way, always lets me do the house describing). This also happens to be the very first round we ever played.

(picture taken from my guest article on the blog Nevermore November)

My description: a little single-wide trailer with a porch, with a small back yard where there’s a sizable vegetable garden. The inside of the trailer is cramped and cluttered with books, notebooks, cups of pens, and random weird knick-knacks from around the world. there are rugs of different sizes and textures all over the floor, along with a love seat and a small wing-backed armchair. the porch has two mismatched plastic lawn chairs, a cigarette pan set on top of a wooden produce crate, a really weather-beaten rug, and tons of hanging plant baskets and window boxes tomatoes hanging over the railings. there’s an enormous, stereotypical hippie VW van with bumper stickers parked outside. there are two pairs of rain boots on the bottom step to the porch.

My friend’s interpretation: A little white trash, kind of earthy and hippieish; vegetarian; someone who travels a lot and can’t throw anything away; there are two pairs of boots, so there are two people. I like to think it is a mother and child. The daddy left them, and the mother is kind of flighty. The kid is about six or seven, a girl. They’re always on the road, going somewhere and doing something cool and having adventures and making the best out of things; they sell a lot of things at the farmer’s market;


Okay, I won't tell you what my friend got right here: suffice it to say that most of it was right. (in fact, she only got two facts wrong. TWO FACTS. TWO!)


Now that I have laid out the rules of this little game, let me rant for a minute about why I absolutely adore it.


Reason #1: Descriptive Writing

I have never really been a descriptive writer. If anything, I suffer from "this is what happened the end" syndrome, without giving any thought to settings or other descriptive... stuff.

I always kind of thought descriptive writing was sort of boring and dumb. Writing these houses gave me a different perspective on that.


I write about them with such a specific image in mind. I know everything about the people who live there. I know their names and how they dress and what they eat, and I know everything that ever happened to them. (Reminder: I am a character nut.)

Picking and choosing what details to incorporate into the paragraph is weird. I pick the stuff that feels right to me-- I've found things tend to work out best that way. I keep it all factual. And, as my person eloquently put it, the house description should work like a word problem: everything that is said is important and helps you figure out something you need to know. No clutter. You should be able to easily pick out the information you need and solve the problem.

I'm not there yet (ha. sigh.) but I think that is a very interesting and good way to look at descriptive writing, and the House Game has been helping me learn how to do it.


Reason #2: You Get Heaps of New Info

When my person and I play the game, she's pretty amazing. She gets an incredible amount of very specific information right. On the one hand, it is fascinating to see that. I've watched in awe as she's accurately figured out things like "teenage child, lives with father, parents divorced" and "currently works in blue-collar job but has always wished for a literary career" and "one of them is a werewolf". It's really fun and kind of validating when she gets stuff right.

But sometimes things are wrong, and that's possibly even more interesting. Sometimes she gets the relationships just a little bit backwards, and character roles get flipped. That's still fascinating because she still gets the relationship mostly right. Every now and then she gets something completely wrong, although that is quite rare. I love seeing how she messes up, because you can really see how with the information that I added one would draw certain (wrong) conclusions.

It raises questions that I hadn't thought to ask. Things are worded in a way I hadn't thought about before, and gives me insight in my own head. It's a little bit like getting a second opinion.


That's all I wanted to say.

If anybody wants to give me their house descriptions, I'd be happy to try to guess stuff. (I'm really bad at guessing, but hey! I'm free!)